For diabetic patients, it is desirable and often necessary to detect symptoms related to hypoglycemic condition, or the onset of such condition. If not treated in a timely manner, hypoglycemia (or commonly associated with low blood sugar level and sometimes referred to as “insulin shock”) will have detrimental if not lethal effect on the patient. As insulin therapy becomes more prevalent for the treatment of diabetes mellitus, the detection of the onset of such conditions is significant.
When a diabetic person experiences hypoglycemic condition, often, the person will experience increased heart rate, perspiration, involuntary shaking, rapid decline in body temperature, paleness, and over the course of a period of hours, the declining blood sugar level may impact the brain functions, potentially resulting in dizziness, hindered bodily coordination, undesirable modification in behavior and the like. Death or permanent brain damage is not uncommon if the declining blood sugar level is left untreated.
Commercially available continuous glucose monitoring systems provide tools for diabetic patients to continuously monitor the glucose levels and provide on-going feedback to the patient to take corrective action. Such systems use glucose sensors which at times exhibit inaccuracies. That is, there are times when the glucose sensor may falsely indicate a low glucose reading, triggering a false warning to the user. The false indications, sometimes referred to as sensor signal dropouts, may be attributable to a variety of factors, such as inherent inaccuracies in the system, the instability of the sensor during the initial time period of use, changes in the sensor's environment, pressure on a blood vessel supplying glucose to the tissue in which the sensor is implanted, noise in the system, and the like. It has been found that such false positive indication of low glucose readings generated by the sensor in use occur more often during night time. This in turn causes a significant inconvenience or disadvantage to the user or the patient if alarms or notifications are associated with low glucose measurements and are triggered during night time, when in fact the glucose level of the patient or the user is not low and the triggered alarm or notification was a false alarm.